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The National Security Agency is a "supercomputing powerhouse," wrote ProPublica.org in July, with "machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second" -- but apparently it has no ability to bulk-search its own employees' official emails.

Thus, ProPublica's Freedom of Information Act demand for a seemingly simple all-hands search was turned down in July with the NSA informing ProPublica that the best it could do would be to go one-by-one through the emails of each of the agency's 30,000 employees -- which would be prohibitively expensive.

(ProPublica reported that companywide searches are "common" for large corporations, which must respond to judicial subpoenas and provide information for their own internal investigations.) [ProPublica, 7-23-2013]

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Firefighters are not infrequently called on to extricate adventurous men from sex toys, but one "armor-plat(ed)" device, six inches in diameter, into which the 51-year-old German entrapped himself in July in Ibiza, Mallorca, was especially challenging, according to the Diario de Mallorca newspaper, and took two hours and a dose of anesthesia toward the end.

The saw blade the emergency workers used wore out during the rescue and had to be replaced, along with two sets of batteries. The man was kept overnight at Can Misses hospital, but was otherwise OK. [The Local (Madrid), 7-5-2013]